Feeling a bit sad that 2 of my best friends don’t care we just bought our first home

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Took us a decade to save towards a deposit but we finally made it and recently moved to our new, modest home.
I have a few really close friends (some of them live abroad) and we are in contact almost daily in a whatsapp group amd always talk about everything. However, teo of them have showed basically zero interest in our new home, never asked any questions when we were looking, only replied with a brief msg when we said our offer was accepted and din’t even once bother asking to see a pic or a question about where the house is, what does it look like etc.
AIBU to expect my closest friends to show some interest in such a major life event?

Someone else buying a house isn’t that interesting really. It would have been polite to ask to see a few pictures I suppose.

I wouldn’t expect anyone to be interested in any part of the house buying process until you’d moved in. Things can so easily go wrong that it’s best just to pretend it’s not happening.

But once you’ve moved in you send a couple of pictures. They say ‘how lovely’, add a champagne bottle emoji, and job done. You’ve got your partner to share the excitement. It’s egotistical to expect more from everyone else.

Yabu - I’m not that interested in seeing pictures of friends’ new homes or where they are in the housing ladder.

I would send a gift or card on moving (rented or purchase) as moving and settling in a new home is sometimes quite a change eg if moving away from friends and family

YABU!

I love my friends and I'd be genuinely happy for them if anyone bought a house but I would not be interested in seeing pictures. I think it's weird that you'd expect somebody to be interested in seeing pictures of YOUR house.

Can I ask (as a non-Brit who spent years living in England), is the ‘house tour’ a cultural thing? I mean, people expecting to be shown around your house if they haven’t been there before? I’ve never encountered it when living in other countries, apart from once, when I was living in a strange old building. But showing someone your entirely unremarkable 3-bed semi — is this cultural?

Saving £70000 for a deposit whilst paying London rents is a remarkable achievement. You have done brilliantly. If your friends haven't shown any interest, it says more about them than you.
All these people on Mumsnet who think it's normal to show no interest in friend's achievements and life events probably don't have many friends themselves.

As far as I know that’s a very usual thing in the states. But never here - except for that one friend I had who turned out to be a loon.

I also live in London and have given over £200,000 to private landlords in renting. Of course it is envious to own your own flat, your money is going into paying off your mortgage which will be your asset when you've finished. Mine has gone into someone else pockets and I have nothing to show after that.

"Don't invest so must interest in yourself"... but I think the OP is saying the opposite of this. She would invest interest in others and she's surprised others don't do the same back.

I mirror others in finding some of the responses here depressing. Have we all become so self focused that we can't show a bit of interest in landmark events in our friends' lives?

I think if they rent, then they probably simply have no interest in house buying - it's just another move to them! This was definitely how I thought of it, until I bought my first house. I didn't 'get' what a big deal it was.

Whereas once I'd bought a house myself, I was much more interested in friends who were buying

It's like babies - I was actively not interested in babies and pregnancy until I was ready for a baby myself.

Of course I congratulated my friends on these things, but to me it was no big deal, because I didn't understand what it was like to want a baby or the trials of getting to own your home.

There's nothing wrong in this, it's only life stages, and sometimes you will be at a different life-stage to your friends.

Living in different countries can mean people develop very different interests and outlooks too - so these friends may naturally be becoming less close, and you may find you are having more in common with local friends.

No, but while you get to decide what’s a ‘landmark event’ for other people. You get to decide on it for yourself, but other people may rank things differently. For instance, we didn’t invite anyone to our wedding, as to us, it wasn’t a big deal — we’d been together for years and years, and it was just a legal contract. We didn’t even tell anyone for years afterwards. Yet for some people their wedding day is one of the most significant days of their lives.

My closest friends got that for me, my first novel being published was a bigger deal than buying a flat, getting married or giving birth, but my ILs would rank those ‘landmark events’ very differently.

This is what life is like though...there are various kinds of people. Some will be very excited and congratulatory about big milestones, and want to be included and will also be effusive with their time and emotional responses. Others will be happy for you and ask a few questions here and there. Yet others will not really care that much but will make an effort to appear as if they do because they will understand that it matters to you. And then there are some who really won't be that bothered - they are likely vaguely happy for you but maybe have other things taking up their mental resources, and that's okay too. It doesn't automatically make them horrible people or terrible friends.

That is assuming it goes up in value in real terms. I never expected it to. But then again I don't really believe that your primary residence is an asset. It makes a bit more sense if its a 5 bed house because then you could probably quite easily downsize (but you also have the burden of higher mortgage payments for years). but not when it's a 2 bed flat. I will live in my 'asset' forever.

I am pregnant so I do have a child to pass it onto. But I am not even banking on my own inheritance (and my parents are actually genuinely wealthy with millions in commercial property as they dont believe in helping kids after university) and would be very old when they pass on. So I don't think my only child (dh getting a vasectomy after this child) would benefit much from waiting eagerly for my inheritance when he or she is 57 (assuming dh or I live to 90).. what a waste of life. Quite likely for dh actually, both his grandfathers are over 90..

Also at 4.37% interest rates, it's approximately 1k in interest every month. That is rent to the bank. I do save the excess to significantly overpay when I can (after maternity leave).. I only reduced my mortgage balance significantly over the past 5 years cos I overpaid 38k. Which is money that I could have invested if I didn't own. The main benefit of buying is not losing your home if you have an emergency fund to pay the mortgage during job loss or maternity leave (and obviously no chance of that happening if you are doing ok). The flipside is it can be more difficult to move.

Not it being an asset. It is frankly a very expensive way of ensuring a roof over baby's head during maternity leave (which is the main reason I bought in 2019 as I wanted my own place to have a baby one day) but this is the system we live in.

Yes it has been a cultural thing from maybe mid 90s to early 2010s. Like a graduation, house ownership was seen as aspirational/an achievement to tick off.

its faded now for lots of reasons - housing crisis being one. I’ve turned down tours (of ordinary family homes) from friends politely in last 10 years after realising how competitive/crass/creepy it is. If you want to be nosey just do it the proper way by getting lost on the way to the toilet 😂

Congrats on your new home op.
I'm getting on a bit now and if life has taught me anything it's that not too many people are interested in what your up to or have got , they are mostly only worried about themselves.
I always try and show an interest in people as I can appreciate how hard it is these days to buy a place , but unfortunately many just don't show it or just too wrapped up in themselves.

They rent and they live abroad. So possibly aren't even aware that buying a house in the UK is considered by some a big deal.

when you read this thread, you can see why there are so many people without friends, liking their own space, relatively isolated.

if you care about someone and call them friend, then taking an interest in their major life events is normal. Deciding to ignore it is not.

i do wonder op if this was about something other than buying a house, the responses would be different. It can cause envy in many. Even when it is a stranger on line.

@NineDaysQueen Arguing against the concensus of opinion on Mumsnet! There in begs the question of whether Mumsnet is representative of the real world. Might be an interesting topic for another thread 😉

You're invested, they're not.

I get that house ownership is very important.

What I find less easy to grasp is the relationship between that, which I get, and the house tours— surely, if you’ve gone to the wire to scrape together a deposit, it’s quite likely that your house will be internally fairly humdrum for a while, because you’ve had to leave it as it was, and hence it’s more reflective of the last owners’ tastes in interior decor than your own?

I have also been given house tours (not people I knew well, coffee morning mothers while I was on mat leave and had just moved to the village) who’d redecorated a room, like a kitchen or bathroom, and found myself saying ‘Lovely!’ all the time to what seemed like substantially similar greige-tiled spaces. I think what took me aback was that the house owner had clearly prepared all the rooms for being shown around, not just the redecorated one, including the marital bedroom, en suite etc, all of which had the lights on, and air fresheners going. Maybe it felt odder because we all lived in v similar types of house — late 1970s red brick built by the same developer, and they were substantially similarly decorated.

I didn’t understand at the time that me inviting the other women over was understood as a house tour invitation, and that our untidy house was a terrible disappointment — no tour, no Quooker, and just bookshelves everywhere.

Yeah she is and she's probably right.

Normally, even if you're not that interested, you fake it with the people that you love and that love you. To not even be able to congratulate a close friend on buying a house is rude to say the least, and hurtful when you know it's important to them.

@Fargo79 she didn't just "move house" though, she bought a house. And even if you don't think it's an important Life Moment, if your friend did you would just ignore it? All it needed was a WhatsApp acknowledgment!

Why didn’t the OP just post a couple of pictures instead of waiting to be asked? That’s the ‘normal’ thing to do. Friends acknowledge, say how lovely it looks, and everyone is happy.

People on here just make everything such hard work!

So what do you talk to your friends about? Buying a house is a massive deal. Surely friends are interested in each others lives ?

They used to be your friends…..if you don’t see these people they are not really your friends anymore….although you think they are yours…..they will have new friends they make the effort with…..,that’s just how life goes…..I couldn’t be arsed asking you about your house buying over message…..just too much of a ball ache…be different if I met you very month at costa …..talk to your proper friends about it….the ones you actually see more than once every 10 years.

I talk to my friends about lots of things, including buying houses, but I also accept quite happily that I'm not the centre of my friends' lives. I don't need that from them. I'm very happy for my friends when they have reached milestones but I'm just not going to jump up and down about it. I don't do that about anything, to be honest, as it's just not my personality. Yes everyone will be happy for each other but we really don't play it like some kind of high school cheerleading exercise.

It's not hard to understand that other people have their own things going on and their lives are not necessarily going to be all about me. No big deal.